Laird Kay’s “Lego City” Photographs Portray the Plasticity of Cities

The little colored bricks that we grew up playing with are more than toys to Berlin based photographer Laird Kay, who uses lego to represent entire cities. His playful photo series titled “Lego City” features miniature skylines and cityscapes inspired by real cities like Dubai, Hong Kong, New York, Toronoto and Vancouver, built to a highly stylized scale from thousands of legos. Kay has gotten to know global cities very well over the past couple of years. As a busy, constantly traveling photographer, he describes himself an architecture geek living in a “plane world”, who disagrees about the way we treat old buildings and then toss them out with the garbage when we’ve finished with them- similar to the way a child destructs his lego buildings to start anew. “Cities used to be the result of collective will and a desire to shape, to control, our environments. They were expressions of the things that happened in them. Now they’re about branding and image. Like plastic, like Lego City, they’re no longer built to last- they can be pulled down when fashions change,” Kay says. “Lego City expresses the modern absence of community in city-shaping. Although stylized, these photographs of Lego City show us how the line between plastic and uninhabited has become virtually indistinguishable from the ‘real thing’.”